Judge Gives Intel More Time To Find Missing E-mail

narramissic writes "ITworld is reporting that Intel has until April 17 (7 days more than the original deadline of April 10) to 'explain to a judge why it lost e-mail records that could provide proof that the chip maker used anticompetitive practices as alleged by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).' According to an order from Vincent Poppiti, the special master hearing negotiations of the case, the court is looking for an accounting of Intel's document preservation problems and a proposal for a better solution for archiving future records."

Re:I call poppycock

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually more difficult than you might suppose to put in place a policy controlling this sort of thing. People don't normally consider their day to day correspondence to be potential legal material (though it obviously is) and as such unless very strong controls are put in place from the top (with consequences for not following the rules) it is quite difficult to manage correspondence and other such records. You can't expect people to spontaneously do it without a system in place, as they are doing Real Work and not thinking about preserving all the annoying little day to day stuff. Most companies do not build a robust structure in their early days due to lack of resources (startups usually have enough problems doing enough to make money period), so the bootstrap problem is almost universal.

If Intel didn't have a system in place from the get go (I don't know, since I don't work there), it is rather difficult to impose such a system - on the day you try to start the new system all the critical information is in the old stuff, and unless you take the time to port it forward you'll be dealing with BOTH the annoyance of digging it out of the old setup and the annoyance of fitting it into the new setup. It's usually easier in the short term to ignore the new system unless (again) management makes a point out of insisting on it being followed and puts a lot of energy into making sure things are the way they are supposed to be.

The bottom line is most people are trying to do their jobs and make something work, not prepare for a hypothetical lawsuit. Big businesses need to be much more careful about this sort of thing (I suppose any business should really, but large ones have deep pockets) but without a strong policy, the will to get it in place properly and port old stuff to a new system (which never helps the bottom line, I might add) it is just a tough thing to do.

People tend to think of big corporations as these well oiled machines, but there are people in them who are just like you and me - they just want to get the frigging thing done and go home, and messing with the corporate document retention system is one more headache without immediate benefit.

Re:I call poppycock

[jimmydevice]

I don't know about the process side of Intel, but the engineering side uses a yearly process named FOCAL (ya, like that old DEC language) that pits employee against employee with a cut-throat review process graded on a curve. The curve assures the group has a minimum of top achevers and a number of "shape up or ship out" unfortunates, even if the whole group consists of A+ workers. This keeps the crew in terror and pay raises to a minimum. And no, I was just a contractor and didn't go through that crap.